NBA owners budge on hard cap demand

For the first time in two years of labor talks, NBA owners made a modest push from their rigid stance on implementing a hard salary cap, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

The owners proposed at Tuesday’s negotiating session an idea similar to the current system that allows teams to pay a luxury tax for going over the cap. Only, now there would be ultra-punitive measures against higher-spending teams. The current system has teams pay a dollar-for-dollar tax for exceeding the cap.

Players Association executive director Billy Hunter has called the hard cap a “blood issue” for the union, and insisted the players would never agree to it.
The owners’ proposal on Tuesday “would still have the affects of a hard cap,” one source with knowledge of the talks said.

The owners didn’t budge on a desire to change the basketball-related income percentage (BRI) to a split that takes the players from 57 percent to the mid 40s, sources said. The players had offered to drop from a 57-43 split to 54-46 at a meeting last week in New York.